


Rain's a Part of How Life Goes

by Kanthia



Series: rain's a part of how life goes [4]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: F/F, Pangender Avatar, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 02:48:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4547256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not a year goes by without some new conundrum arising that the world thinks only Korra can respond to.</p><p>(The Spirit World, a trip by canoe, a wall of stones. Spoilers.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rain's a Part of How Life Goes

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Ursula K. Le Guin. I'd give my firstborn to see an Earthsea/Avatar crossover...inspired in part by Vienna Teng's [Lullaby for a Stormy Night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXUpPFCesTA).

Not a year goes by without some new conundrum arising that the world thinks only Korra can respond to. Usually she spends half her energy trying to convince people that the problems of the world should be solved by the world; it’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

The newborn has brown-eyed airbender parents. One of her eyes is brown, the other is gold. The mother swears the child is her husband’s daughter; Zuko swears, in some way he can’t place or define, that it’s Azula. He’s profoundly disturbed. Korra declares that she’s heading for the Spirit World as soon as the Day of Rejoining has passed, for something is amiss. Some problems she recognizes are hers to deal with alone. 

She asks if Asami would be able to take the time off work to come with her. Asami has already packed her things.

* * *

There’s a field of clover when they camp for the first night, ready for brewing. Asami builds a fire while Korra harvests something that tastes like sausage from among the lily pads. There’s rice with scallion and gopher-robin egg, a salad of sorrel and dandelion greens, sweet floral tea. It’s spring in this part of the Spirit World, and Korra waterbends in recognition. Maybe raspberries tomorrow, if it’s closer to the fall; it’s hard to keep track of time in a world where the season depends on one’s emotions.

“We’re heading for a river,” Korra says, as they weave a hammock. They carry no maps, and navigate by intuition. “There’s a place called the Wall of Stones I’d like to visit.” Dead things live there, on the far side. Spirits don’t die the way bodies do, though Raava used to be the only one that would find a new home, her quest eternally unfinished. There are children now, just old enough to get their tongues around words, speaking as though they’ve lived before. Azula has been reincarnated. Korra wants to know why.

 _If you build a door, things will go through it_ , Asami thinks, missing her parents and watching the stars dance in the sky as they try to sleep. Is there a little girl or a little boy out there with her mother’s soul?

* * *

Korra drags the canoe ashore at a moment’s thought to ask a fox if a child born, say, to Airbenders, but with the spirit of a Firebender, would have both alight in them. In return she gives it a scroll describing the final days of Earth Queen Hou-Ting. The fox finds them at their campsite two days later with a scroll in its mouth bearing the seal of Wan Shi Tong, thanking them for the history, and professing that it does not know that which could not have been known for twenty thousand years.

“To not know is to choose between fear and hope,” it writes. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” It apologizes for its failure in not knowing, but offers a free wish to clear the debt. Asami, emboldened, asks for an uncensored original of Avatar Gaius’ Book of the Wild Valley, which a fox produces later that day. It’s illustrated in embarrassing detail. It’s a good night.

* * *

“I didn’t really realize what I’d done, I was so young,” Korra says, from the stern of the canoe. She’s yelling to be heard over the pouring rain. For a while they’d considered having Korra bend the rain away from them, but it’s alright, getting drenched. It makes the promise of a shelter and fire later in the evening that much more enticing.

Besides, the wind is so still that the whole world is silver on grey, and it’s beautiful, getting lost in it.

“I think I was three when I moved the earth,” she continues. “It just sort of happened. The whole world was freaking out looking for the new Avatar and I was sitting in my house playing this stupid game I’d made up where I’d smash rocks and water together. After a while my mother got suspicious about all the mud in the house. I showed her the game -- it must have given her a heart attack.”

In the evening the rain has not let up in the slightest and Korra shows her what she’d meant. It’s literally a recipe for mud pies. A child’s plaything, but Aang had found his path through children’s toys, as well. She throws the pie at Asami. Asami flings a handful of mud back.

There were so many hard years in there, after her mother died, when all her father could talk about was how damn _unfair_ it was, that benders get everything and nonbenders get nothing. And of course there were times when she believed it, when she would have given her right brain just to feel the earth respond to her feet, to feel a flame bloom in her hands. To speak the language of the world and have the world hear her. But as she throws mud at the Avatar she wonders if being a nonbender is a gift in and of itself: with no ability to bend the world around her, all she could do is bend the world inside her.

Korra thinks she understands. “It took me a while to understand how insignificant bending is, in the long run.” They’re eating dinner, filthy and thoroughly debauched. “I honestly think it’s a side-effect of being the Avatar -- not the main purpose -- bending four elements. Bending’s how people back in Wan’s time survived in the wilds, and nonbenders have other ways of getting by. Like inventing things.”

“Or falling in love.” Asami taps Korra on the nose.

The Lion-Turtles created element-bending. Humanity created spirit-bending. “Or falling in love.”

It rains through the night, soaking the whole world.

* * *

They hit the river. Korra teaches Asami to bow-sweep and Asami looks out for rocks. They pull the canoe through mud on more than one occasion. (“Don’t worry too much about it,” Korra says, knee-deep in muck. “Sometimes a river is just a river.” She’s beautiful when she’s covered in dirt, shirtsleeves rolled up.) By mid-afternoon the rain lets up. Finally, they find the thing they were looking for: a small wall of stones about six feet across and two feet tall, sitting unceremoniously by a section of the river so narrow they’d been forced to portage around it, the wall mostly hidden by trees. It doesn’t seem to be dividing anything, but Korra approaches it with reverence.

“I’ve crossed this wall, before,” she says. “Definitely. I’ve been here before. But this --”

There’s a depression in the middle of the wall, a dip of a few inches. A rock had come loose, or was pulled out.

“Looks like airbending,” Asami says, pointing to a stone on their side, blown a few feet away, that looked as though it could fit in there. A realization hits her like a bolt from the blue, and her eyes widen, turning to meet Korra’s equally shocked expression.

“Do you think --”

“-- Yeah.” Korra rubs her temple. “-- You open a door and people will want to go through it. I wonder if he got, I wonder if he got Laghima. If Zaheer got Laghima.”

“If Laghima got Zaheer.”

“It’s not --” Korra swallows. “They were just trying to re-establish balance. They couldn’t have known. He couldn’t have known.”

They leave the stone on the ground. Death’s a wall to be crossed, but every wall should be crossable both ways. If not, you've built a prison.

* * *

“I love her,” Asami whispers, into the mist before them. On the surface of the lake, the dead wander about, some heading towards the open portal. “I miss her. But I don’t think I’d want to see her again.”

“It took me seventy years to realize that about Lu Ten,” Iroh says. “You do your mother a great honour by not seeking her out.”  
  
Let her bones moulder, turn into soil. Death is a great kindness to the world-weary.

* * *

Korra meditates and Asami brings her tea. They’re on a pretty little campsite, south-facing, but the world is giving them a brilliant sunset, regardless. Asami walks up from behind and Korra turns to face her, a little too blue in the eyes. It’s not Korra.

“Thank you,” Raava says. “Your kindness is appreciated.”

Asami sits down beside them. She supposes that when she fell in love with Korra she fell in love with Raava as well, this cantankerous old spirit who loves life beyond reason. “I was wondering --” she says, “-- They’re gone, of course, but do you remember them?”

“Yes, yes I do.” Raava chuckles to herself. “It’s an irony that everyone is coming back at the moment my children were lost to me. May I tell you a story?”

(Asami loves stories.)

Avatar Jia died young and remarkable in her thirty-third year, martyred by a poisoned cup of tea after the signing of the treaty that ended the War of Ten Mountains. The monsoon that followed her death brought new life to the drought-ridden battlefields -- a miracle deserving of her nickname, Rain, and a fitting conclusion to a life spent tirelessly mediating a war that had ravaged two generations. The Confederacy of Airbenders, leaving their ruined tunnels and becoming wanderers in an attempt to make peace with the land, made a beautiful statue in her honour at the site of her death; hers would not be an easy act to follow, and the world clumsily wandered into peace.

It was not popular to be an earthbending national in those days, for during the war any such bender was conscripted into Her Holiness’ Army, and though the draft was abolished shortly after the war (one of Rain’s stipulations) it took some time for the practice to be stamped out in the westernmost reaches of the Empire. In those strange times the Empress’ first daughter gave birth to a jaundiced child who barely made it through his first year. Crown Prince Kai-An, Heir Apparent to the throne of the Holy Earth Empire only by virtue of outliving his brothers, became the subject of a long and complicated legal battle when he demonstrated perfectly adequate firebending by setting his cousin’s hairpiece alight at the age of four.

Rain had been an earthbender by birth, but had preferred waterbending; it was on the basis of this clause that Her Holiness’ Royal Clerics (lawyers by trade) argued that the Avatar had been reborn as an earthbender and not a firebender, and in that way Kai-An’s claim to the throne was legitimate. Their opponents, from the Church of the Unyielding, argued that the kid shared a suspicious number of features with one of the firebending prisoners of war who had been a slave in the palace and had been frequently seen in the princess’ harem. Unfortunately for them, there was a precedent for the noble lineage defaulting to the mother, and they had to be satisfied with publicly executing the four most likely candidates for Kai-An’s father.

Kai-An was paunchy and eager to please. He had no mind for maths but a certain charisma that served him well; he survived two kidnappings and one attempted assassination before he was seven, when a back-room deal sent him to an earthbending academy three days from the capital city. Its headmistress was a stalwart, inflexible, callous, beautiful young woman named Wei Xia, who had twenty-seven other students, all girls. She had been infatuated with Rain in her childhood and very quickly learned that Kai-An was nothing like his past life. He learned earthbending during the day, practiced firebending in secret at night. The girls would sneak out to watch the strange prince from the city dancing with fire in his eyes at midnight; he’d let them, graciously, traded favours for favours: extra snacks, doing his chores, and as he got older, kisses and other, more intimate things. Hard work and fresh air brought light to Kai-An’s eyes, and he became oddly handsome, in time.

But Kai-An never forgot the kisses he traded for dances, the way that kindness is more beautiful than beauty, and how everyone and everything is wonderful when stripped bare.

“In time he took the name Gaius,” Raava says. “I hated him with the jealousy of a mother who knows her child can do better. I had loved Rain so fiercely, and so had the rest of the world, that nothing he did could possibly live up to his birthright. He took it in stride -- abandoned any idea of being a great mediator, or a great king, or even a decent Avatar, and instead dedicated his life to pleasure.”

Asami wants to ask, _do you miss him_. Raava sighs. “I miss him dearly. He took my gift and threw it into the ocean, as if to say  _I will carve my own path, out of the dirt in my mouth, if I must_. He showed me that destiny is a load of hogwash to those with a clear mind. It gave us endless happiness.”

“I’ve read a little about him. He sounds --” Asami considers her words carefully. Raava still scares her, a little. “--Interesting.” She takes a sip of tea.

“Korra reminds me of him.” Asami spits out the entire mouthful. Raava laughs, and oh, that laughter is a world-creating light! “In only good ways! Aang’s world was in so dire a place, you know, and it made him who he was. And Korra knew she could never be Aang. So she decided to become something entirely new.”

Hours later, Korra wakes to the warmth of Asami’s head on her shoulder. She mumbles something in her sleep. This is all right. You take the bad with the good. A world with only sunshine becomes a desert.

* * *

_Well, now I am grown_

_And these years have shown_

_Rain's a part of how life goes_

* * *

There’s a two-week period after International Day of the Rejoining during which the Avatar and the CEO of Future Industries are unavailable, thank you very much. They’re in the Spirit World on their yearly expedition in a little homemade birch canoe, and they do not answer phone calls. At first Future Industries was a little embarrassed for the circadian absence of its leader, but soon the world decided to celebrate what was indeed a very good thing, and the Rejoining became the New Year, and the holiday extended into the next two weeks.

It had started as a mission: the reconnecting of the worlds had put a damper on death, the old leveller, and some spirits of the newly deceased were finding new bodies, like Raava in her prime. Reincarnation had become the plaything of the peasantry, precisely when the old Avatars were all lost, and people needed a little guidance when they suddenly realized they’d lived before. Korra had been thinking of finding some mischief-makers on the other side and parlaying with them, asking them if they’d cease leaving trails of false memories in newborns. Asami had joined her the first time (just to make sure she was taking care of herself, she swore). They’d found peace in a little river-paddling, and it had turned into something else.

They leave from Republic City to as little fanfare as possible, stealing away in the early hours before dawn with gear and a little bit of food. The world will supply the rest, though Asami always brings a bag of these little bon-bons with rum in the centre, and there’s a certain irony to the poor quality of spirits that the spirit world produces. Fair enough! She’ll take two weeks of fish-corn if it means two weeks alone with Korra.

Their paddles and the canoe is always at the same place they left it, at the bay of a huge lake. There are no directions in this world, but Asami always gets the feeling that they are heading south. South is the direction towards home, to Korra. Always heading home.

* * *

A bard by the name of Jet Lee wandered the Spirit World in those days. A nonbender with a particular way of plucking the yueqin, he was mute but for when he was singing, which was often; his voice was deep, and tremulous, and might remind the listener of the kinds of people who get lost in mountains, or the mountains themselves. Rumour passed through the hills that he’d encountered Korra and Asami on several of their expeditions, and it was he who composed the Ballads of the Avatar and the Engineer. A love story in four parts, one for each element, one for each season.

Four’s a rough number. It represents death and rebirth, the return of winter, the turning-over, the start of something new. Nobody ever said it outright, but something about Jet Lee reminded them of a boy who’d died in the bowels of Lake Laogai, and if he remembered anything, he said nothing. In the early days of the Great Remembering everyone claimed to be some sort of reincarnation, which was all right. Better too much than too little.

You’d ask him if he saw anything when he was dead, or while he was with them, and he’d smile a little smile and pluck a few strings and hum the first bars of an old war song, about someone coming home: _leaves from the vine, falling so slow_...

* * *

(Go on a pilgrimage to the Spirit World! Paddle its lakes and rivers, and if you are kind to the water, it may let you visit the dinner table of the Dragon of the West, or hear the trees sing the Ballads of the Avatar and the Engineer. Treat the world kindly and the world will treat you kindly in return. But know this, runaway: sadness is a kindness, and rainy days are a blessing.)

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are always appreciated <3 Thank you so much for all the positive feedback this series has gotten! To be honest I'm not sure if I'm finished with it quite yet, although this feels pretty final, haha. We'll see.
> 
> You can always find me hanging out on [tumblr](http://kanthia.tumblr.com/).


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